There are many file types. It will be an interesting exercise to write a script that can enumerate through all the files inside a directory, its descendants, print a report that provides details on types of files (files with different file types), and the count of each file type present. This recipe is an exercise on how to write scripts that can enumerate through many files and collect details.
The file command can be used to find out the type of the file by looking at the contents of the file. In Unix/Linux systems, file types are not determined based on the extension of the file (like the Microsoft Windows platform does). This recipe aims at collecting file type statistics of a number of files. For storing the count of files of the same type, we can use an associative array and the file command can be used to fetch the file type details from each of the files.